THREE
If Holle had just agreed the first time Pieter asked her to dance, they wouldn't be sort-of-but-not-really talking about marriage and babies at a riff-off.
"Did you like the brownstone house?"
Holle averts her attention to Pieter, phone in one hand and eyes focused expectantly on her. Beyond Pieter's left shoulder, she can see two of their beatboxers approaching a group of young men clad in maroon jackets. One of the local acapella groups, probably. "What?"
"The brownstone house with the remodeled attic," Pieter elaborates, moving closer to be heard over the music. "Mikael just sent me a message asking if we want it. He has a potential buyer waiting if we decide not to take it."
"Oh," The question makes a lot more sense once Pieter mentions their realtor. "The brownstone," Holle muses out loud to buy herself some time, hoping Pieter doesn't see through her act. Had she liked that one? The two weeks before their departure from Germany had been a whirlwind of packing, tour preparations and house hunting, and Holle barely remembers a single detail about the dozen places Mikael had shown them. Then again, she hadn't really paid attention to any of the houses. One could say her heart simply wasn't in it.
"No," Holle says decisively. "The commute to headquarters would take too long; we're only fifteen minutes away now and we already wake up early enough as it is."
Pieter's eyes are too appraising, his silence a moment too long. But even if he has anything to say, he knows better than to bring it up right now. Instead he merely nods and sends out a short message to Mikael, apologizing for the wasted time and asking him to go ahead with the other party. It is the fourth such message he has sent to the man since they arrived in America.
Holle goes back to people-watching, her eyes scanning every last person in attendance. They have yet to puzzle out the mystery of their host and the purpose of this gathering, and she's starting to wonder if it had been a mistake to lead her singers here on their precious night off before they resume touring tomorrow. Meanwhile, Pieter pulls up the list of houses they're considering and notes that Holle has crossed out at least half of them. And to say that she has provided him with flimsy excuses would be generous, because too far from headquarters now joins the ranks of too many walls to repaint, too close to my parents and his personal favorite: the basement looks like something out of a horror movie. Pieter is beginning to wonder if Holle even wants to move. They don't have to; their landlord is a reasonable lady who would be more than willing to renew their lease.
"You know," Pieter speaks up carefully as he puts away his phone. Holle had been the one to suggest that they get their own place and if that is really what she wants, he doesn't want to discourage her. But he's known her long enough to know that something isn't quite right here. "We don't actually have to move if you don't want to. Wanda said she wouldn't mind if we-"
"Oh, look," Holle says mildly, as if she isn't purposely redirecting the conversation. "The Bellas have arrived. We should say hello, yes?"
Because Pieter is a smart man who knows better than to push Holle (and also because watching the littlest Bella fawn over Holle like a mouse admiring a cat while the cat sizes it up and considers the best way to serve it for dinner is downright hilarious), he merely nods and grins in anticipation.
"Let the hunt begin," He announces ominously as they approach the Bellas, and Holle rolls her eyes and tosses a fond dummkopf his way before they slip into their public personas.
It is nothing short of fascinating to watch how quickly the party goes back to normal after their little riff-off, which Holle quickly gathers was meant to be the highlight of this evening. Barely ten minutes have elapsed since Pieter led their team's celebratory rendition of Jump but already the high of their victory is fading, and it takes with it most of the crowd's energy. A playlist of current hits still fills the air while half of those in attendance dance along but for the most part, guests have taken to wandering around with drinks in hand while they mingle and strike up conversations.
As Pieter makes his way back to her from the bar, Holle casts her eyes around the room and finds not a single one of their teammates within her sight, which leads her to conclude that they must still be amongst the crowd of dancers moving freely in the middle of the room. At least they're having fun, which is all she wants for them tonight. This American tour is by no means on the same scale as some of their others, with most venues offering up a measly audience of a hundred people at most. But it is more fast-paced than any they have taken on, with most weeks seeing an average of two performances and sometimes in different states. Holle is beginning to see why the Bellas often cycled through the same handful of numbers over and over again during their previous tours. Not that she would ever consider such a thing, of course; DSM has a reputation to uphold, a standard they must be held to at all times. It is a source of endless pride most days but the pressure to live up to the bar they have set for themselves can sometimes be brutal and exhausting. At least this has been an easier week, with only that one performance at the car show scheduled for them. And for her overworked singers, tonight's party could not have come at a better time. Tomorrow she will put them back to work, maybe fit in a few hours of practicing a new number before they are scheduled to leave. But for the rest of this evening, she will let her teammates unwind without the weight of their Kommissar's watchful gaze upon them.
"Thank you," She accepts her drink with an appreciative nod as Pieter returns to her side. "I am rather surprised you aren't out there with them," Holle confesses, referring to the dancers. Between the riff-off and their victory number, she has had her fill of impromptu dancing for the night.
"Perhaps later," Pieter shrugs. "You are typically more inclined to join me after a few drinks."
Holle frowns. "And here I thought you were simply being a gentleman, offering to fetch me a drink. Ulterior motives from even my most trusted of comrades," She laments, throwing in a disappointed sigh for good measure. It is a deviation from her usual behavior in public but their victory, insignificant though it may be, has left her in high spirits.
"I have been trying to get you to dance since the day we met, Holle," Pieter reminds her, laughing at her dramatics. "At this point, you should simply work under the assumption that everything I do is an attempt to talk you into a dance."
"I salute your dedication to the cause," Holle raises her drink in his direction before she takes a sip out of it. "But honestly, Pieter, must you bring that up at every chance?"
"Our past is very precious to me, Liebling," He grins. "It does my pride well to remember a time when you were not good at everything; a time when you were, in fact, horrible at something."
"I ask the Gods every day how I was fortunate enough to find such a supportive partner," Holle mutters into her drink while Pieter laughs.
The story goes as such: Holle had been classically trained in performing arts at a very young age, as most highborn children are. Unlike most of her peers however, she had not groaned and suffered through her lessons until such a time that it became acceptable for her to stop. While other children celebrated their newfound freedom after giving up piano lessons and dance classes, Holle begged her mother to let her continue. As her classmates focused on outscoring each other and getting accepted into the most prestigious of higher-learning institutes, Holle turned her attention to competitions, auditions and the likes. When the time came for her to select a university, her father had been outraged at the fact that Holle had chosen to forgo his alma mater and attend a conservatory instead. He even went so far as to threaten to disown her but after some advice from her mother (she will fail, and then she will return willingly to us and the right path in life; truly, her mother had been an endless source of support and optimism), he had given Holle his blessing - and more importantly, his financial backing - and so she had found herself bound for one of Germany's top music conservatories.
Nothing could have prepared Holle for what awaited her at UdK. There was no shortage of students like her, those who came with years of formal training and a number of trophies from competitions all over Europe. But they were merely dedicated to music, while others loved music. The ones who stood out most clearly were the scholarship students, the self-taught prodigies and savants who had soldiered through so many obstacles to make it this far. Those students had thrown a party the night before classes were scheduled to start and somehow, Holle had found herself completely frozen in a crowd of intoxicated youngsters, all of them dancing to a beat she had never heard before. It wasn't the music that bothered her, but the way these people moved instinctively - as if dancing was second nature to them, as if the music ran in their veins and lifted their hands, arranged their legs, guided their hips. Holle, with all her years of ballet and waltz and a number of other dances, found herself completely incapable of replicating that ease, that connection the others felt with the beat. And suddenly she wondered if she belonged there after all.
Pieter stumbled upon her then: an immaculately groomed and entirely out of place young woman two seconds away from having an existential crisis on the dance floor. After a brief introduction, most of which was just Pieter asking her for her name and inquiring after her health while a panicked Holle questioned her life choices out loud, he quickly got to the bottom of the matter and proceeded to guide her through a few songs until Holle felt somewhat assured that even though she didn't yet belong, she could learn to adapt to this world.
The story of his normally-composed fiancée nearly having an existential crisis while attending a dance party remains one of Pieter's favorites to this very day, while Holle prefers to leave out the earliest bits of their shared history to spin the tale of their reunion instead. It is, in her opinion, a much better story: years of pining, countries and seas between them, Pieter's hopeless attempts at rekindling their relationship, the way they had simply fallen back together one evening. But today, Holle finds herself bringing up the rest of their first chapter together.
"Do you remember," She asks Pieter, a small smile playing on her lips. "The week we drove down to Spain?"
"I remember the night we spent in France on the way there," He waggles his eyebrows suggestively. "And the fortune we spent on gas." Pieter sobers up instantly at that memory, and even Holle suppresses a wince at the thought. Looking back on it now, the number doesn't seem nearly as outrageous as it had been to their younger selves. But back then, with Pieter on scholarship and Holle trying to make the most of her spending money to avoid unnecessary contact with her parents, each stop at a gas station had felt like the prelude to financial ruin.
"I still think it was money well spent," Pieter states firmly. "I finally got you to dance without having it choreographed beforehand." That had been the whole point of their road trip: two months after their initial meeting, Pieter had noticed that Holle simply could not lose herself in a sea of fellow dancers, not with all of their friends watching. So he'd bundled her up into his car and they charted a course for Spain, where Pieter was convinced Holle would succumb to the siren call of carnival music. His plan had worked, because not a bone in Holle's body protested when he pulled her into the throng of revelers, not even when Pieter took her by the hand and asked her to dance in the streets.
He fell in love with the way she clapped her hands along to the beat, the way she laughed when the street dancers twirled her around, the way her eyes lit up when she found him after they briefly lost sight of each other. And on the way back to Germany, he fell in love with Holle herself.
They broke up four days later.
"And look how far you've come, Kommissar," Pieter says to a smiling Holle, choosing not to linger upon darker memories of their past. "Tonight was a far cry from the catatonic state I found you in that first night."
"And we are back to this again," Holle crosses her arms, careful not to spill the drink still in her hand. "It has been more than ten years, Pieter. You can stop bringing that up now."
"Alright," Pieter grins, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. "Enough of that – for tonight, at least." Before Holle can give voice to further protest, he jumps from one unpleasant subject matter to another. "Can we talk about our apartment instead?"
Holle lets one hand fall back to her side while the other lifts her drink to her lips for a sip. "What about the apartment?" She asks, her features a portrait of indifference.
Pieter decides to just go for it; sometimes a direct approach is the best when it comes to Holle. "Do you want to buy it?"
At least Holle has the decency to drop her clueless act. "Pieter," She says quietly, conveying indecision with a simple wide-eyed look.
"Why didn't you say anything?" Pieter asks gently, reaching out for her hand. Holle laces their fingers together and shakes her head with a tiny smile, one that usually means she's embarrassed of herself. That bit of information merely adds to Pieter's confusion. "Holle, you were the one who suggested we buy a house."
Holle smiles again, this time with her eyes. "We've been together for ten years now, did you know that?" Of course he knows, and he also knows she's aware that he's been keeping track of their relationship. So Pieter remains silent and waits for Holle to go on. "I thought that maybe getting a house together would be the next logical step for us to take." She shrugs, trying to downplay her next words. "I know that after a decade, other people do… other things but-" Pieter won't let her go down that road.
"Liebling," He sighs, lightly squeezing the fingers intertwined with his own. "We are not other people," Pieter reminds her with a smile, trying to lighten things up. "We are mesh and leather wearing acapella gods, or have you forgotten?" At least that draws a laugh out of Holle. "Other people can do as they please, and we will do as we please, yes? Besides, some people can be together for twenty, thirty, even forty years without bending to society's expectations and still be as happy as normal people." Pieter has no idea why he's dancing around the words marriage and wedding when Holle has already agreed to marry him someday, but right now does not seem like the right time to discuss such matters.
As usual, Holle seems to be on the same page. She withdraws her hand from his and pushes back a wisp of hair brave enough to escape her topknot. "So you wouldn't mind," She asks hesitantly, eyes guarded yet hopeful. "If we stay in the apartment? I mean, we've lived there since university, and I thought maybe you would want to move on, get a place of our own."
"The apartment can be a place of our own," Pieter points out with a smile. "We've been there for ten years now; I'm rather fond of the place and all of our memories. And if you're happy there-"
"I am," Holle nods quickly, having made up her mind. "It's close to headquarters and most of our teammates live within walking distance. Our neighbors are nice, and we get just the right amount of sun in the summer." She hesitates for a moment, but words that have weighed heavily upon her for months now push their way past her sealed lips. "It's more than enough space for us and," Holle inhales, exhales, smiles at Pieter. "And we have two spare rooms, if we ever decide to…"
It's suddenly impossible for her to complete that sentence the minute she makes eye contact with Pieter, but he doesn't need her to. He's thought of it himself, what they could use those two empty rooms for. Holle's four-room apartment had seemed ridiculous at first, completely and embarrassingly over the top and unnecessarily extravagant for a student. Her mother had insisted that she live somewhere presentable, just in case our relatives ever drop by. You wouldn't want to embarrass us, Holle. But they've managed to fill the space up over the years, not so much with furnishings but with memories and laughter and late-night dances when Pieter spins her from one room into another just to laugh at how dizzy she gets. Pieter has thought of properly filling up the rooms though, with freshly-painted walls and delicate furniture, books and toys and the likes.
Children and nursery join the list of words they don't feel like mentioning right now. Instead Pieter lets the moment pass and eyes Holle's empty drink. "Are you ready to dance now?"
Holle blinks, and her eyes are promptly cleared of daydreams and possible futures. "Well," She sighs, resigning herself to the inevitability of Pieter making her join the knot of sweaty, drunk dancers in the middle of the room. "I suppose everyone is sufficiently inebriated and won't be paying attention to us."
"Come now," Pieter grins as he relieves her of her empty glass and sets it down on the table next to them. He holds a hand out to Holle, waiting for her to lead him to the dance floor. It would not do for the others to see him pulling the Kommissar along.
She smirks and reaches for Pieter's hand, pushes down the part of her that still panics at the thought of dancing without planning out choreography beforehand. If Pieter were to ever find out she still feels this way sometimes, he would never let her live it down.
"Is that a thing?" Jesse asks, appearing out of nowhere to scare the living crap out of Beca.
"Dude!" Beca hisses in reproach as she follows her boyfriend's line of sight. "Wait, what?" She blurts out, confusion creasing her forehead as her eyes land upon two of their German rivals. Kommissar's blonde hair shines like a beacon (or like, a visual siren call) and there's no mistaking the defined jawline her dance partner sports.
There's also no mistaking the fact that the two are dancing very, very… intimately; Beca settles on a milder label even though a dozen crude terms come to mind. With Kommissar's back to her sidekick and his hands quite possessively on her sides, they look like any other young couple getting it on in a nightclub.
"Huh," Stacie remarks as she joins a stunned Beca and an amused Jesse. "I did not see that one coming." And that's really saying something, because Stacie claims she knew about Aubrey and Unicycle all along.
"Dude," Beca says once more for lack of a more eloquent reaction. "Wow," She shakes her head and quickly averts her eyes before she gets mesmerized by the sight or something along those lines because god damn, those two could succeed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as the two most beautiful human beings to come together and potentially grace mankind with their genetically flawless offspring.
When she turns her back to the Germans (okay, she needs to stop calling them that), Beca is surprised to find herself face-to-face with most of the Bellas. "Too bad none of us are going to remember that tomorrow," She shrugs.
"I remember every minute I spent in my mother's womb," Lilly says, adjusting her voice to a nearly-audible volume to make up for the loud music.
Emily happens to be the lucky one standing next to her, and stares at Beca in wide-eyed horror.
"It's only weird if you don't roll with it," Beca tells her, throwing the girl an assuring smile. "Okay," She turns back to Jesse after Emily hesitantly nods and walks away. "I'm going to need another drink before I can deal with… that." She points in the general direction of the dance floor, resisting the temptation to take another look.
Stacie has no such reservations. "Someone's getting lucky tonight," She predicts with a grin. "And I'm not talking about Amy."
"Not talking about this," Beca mutters, grabbing Jesse's hand. "So not talking about this," She insists to herself, trying to ignore the fact that both Amy and Bumper have gone missing.
Jesse lets his girlfriend lead him to the bar, turning around every few steps to observe DSM's leaders. "They can't be that bad," He muses out loud.
"What?" Beca demands incredulously, staring blankly at Jesse as they reach the bar. "Okay, so she's in your head. I know how it is. But trust me, they are that bad."
"Come on, Becs," Jesse smiles. "Can't you see it? He's one of those acapella boys, she's one of those acapella girls…"
Beca crosses her arms and glares at him. "Don't you say it," She growls. "Don't you dare finish that sentence, Swanson."
"They're just like us!"
"Damn you, Jesse!" She really doesn't want to think of them that way. Beca wants them to be stereotypically German and villainous, and she wants them to be cold and detached and professional. She needs them to be those things, to build them up in her mind so that she can plot their downfall at the Worlds and not feel bad about it because otherwise she'll feel awful about potentially upsetting German Goddess over there. That face was not made for frowning, or crying, or just any kind of upset expression, basically.
But she's fighting a losing battle, Beca grudgingly admits to herself as she sneaks a look at the couple. They've left the dance floor and retreated to a quiet corner, and Kommissar even has her head on Assistant Kommissar's shoulder as his arm-
"Okay, this is just ridiculous," Beca announces, reaching around Jesse to stick her hand in his back pocket.
"Woah!" Jesse exclaims as she inadvertently gropes his ass. "Becs, not that I don't appreciate the booty lovin' but-"
Beca finally fishes out his phone, and Jesse nods in understanding once she shows him what she'd been after. "What happened to yours?" He asks as Beca taps on the Google icon.
"Battery died," Beca explains as she types in Das Sound Machine. She's bound to find their names somewhere, right?
Good old Google.
I don't know what happened, people. This chapter was supposed to be a chance for me to write the Bellas interacting with these two, maybe slip in a few references to this scene from the movie, try to steer my super OOC characters back onto the path of canonical characterization. But this explosion of sappy, cliché, cheesy backstory happened instead. There are no words for how ashamed of myself and sorry I am.
And now onwards we go, with more cheesy fluff to come! Because I am fandom trash, okay?
E Salvatore,
July 2015.
